A team of game industry veterans from studios including Crytek, Ubisoft and Treyarch have come together to form a new development outfit, Adhesive Games, using their years of experience working on titles like Metroid Prime, Hawken, Far Cry 3, Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 to work on an all-new multiplayer-focussed game, Outrise.

Described by the team as “multiplayer Shadow Of The Colossus meets Left 4 Dead,” and inspired by classic sci-fi adventures like Star Wars, RoboCop and Blade Runner, Outrise is currently in early development but aims to be a game about “multiplayer boss fights and asymmetrical gameplay.”

Sound familiar? Hours after Outrise was announced, Turtle Rock’s new shooter, Evolve, was also revealed – read about the next game from the Left 4 Dead developer over here.

“Remember reaching the giant boss at the end of a level?” writes Adhesive Games on the official Outrise site. “Now imagine that boss was controlled by your friend or someone online.”

“You spawn in to the game, grab your weapons, and emerge from the underground and into the fight,” writes Adhesive, painting a further picture. “Terrifying roars of the Megalith echo through the streets. As you reach the battlefield a fellow comrad is crushed to a fine red mist beneath the ungodly weight of the beast. It’s all out warfare. Fifteen players fighting against one like a colony of fire ants attacking its prey. A team of davids against a towering goliath.”

In the same way that Left 4 Dead focusses on asymmetrical multiplayer encounters as humans face off against a collection of zombies with different abilities, Outrise will also make asymmetrical play its focal point tasking player-controlled soldiers with taking down a single boss, also controlled by a player.

“As a foot soldier you have access to an array of high power weapons like rifles, drones, and explosives. You can drive land and air vehicles and even climb the boss itself. You and an entire team work together to take down one player.” Adhesive is already giddy over the potential to play as a boss in Outrise, writing:

Words cannot describe the level of destructive power you feel playing as the boss. You are an unstoppable machine of death facing an army of real players by yourself. Entire teams are decimated with the click of your button. The earth trembles as you scale the landscape, leaving complete and utter destruction in your wake. Stomp enemies into pancakes, drop enemy-seeking mines, and unleash horrendous weaponry on your foes the likes of which the world has never seen.”

Sounds fantastic.

It’s not all ice-cream and rainbows when you’re playing as the boss in Outrise, though, because you’ll need to be keenly aware of everything that’s going on across the battlefield as enemies climb up your character’s chassis, attack from the ground and air and surround you while plotting to take you down.

From the sounds of things, Outrise will be available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, but judging by how far game development still has to go (project lead James Wearing began by himself around mid-2012) we may only see the game in 2015. There are plans, however, to release something smaller in scope initially and then expand with new bosses and environments added over time, so here’s hoping that we might get a glimpse of Outrise before the year is out.